Two months ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proposed a $150 billion economic stimulus package. Congress balked in part because back in February it had approved the Bush administration’s $152 billion stimulus package. Two weeks ago, Pelosi was back hawking a $600 billion stimulus package. Now, President-elect Barack Obama is reportedly preparing – in consultation with Pelosi and other congressional Democrats – a $1 trillion stimulus package. This epic federal spending explosion is on top of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, and the trillions of dollars of new “liquidity” created throughout 2008 by the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, unemployment rises (except in Washington, D.C., of course) as the recession deepens, even as Washington’s stimulus madness spreads faster than the monster foiled by Steve McQueen in the classic 1950s B horror movie, “The Blob.”

We should do the same thing to the Washington stimulus madness that McQueen did to the Blob – freeze it. Stop spending money the government doesn’t have. Stop approving taxpayer-funded bailouts. Stop piling up ever-more-unconscionable debt that future generations will have to pay back. Stop panicking. Stop the political grand-standing. Stop making the government blob bigger, please, while there’s still something approximating a free enterprise economy that can eventually be revived.